This invention pertains to disposable absorbent articles, and more particularly to a child's disposable absorbent training pant having an elasticized three-dimensional absorbent for improving the containment of waste.
Various disposable absorbent articles exist today for absorbing waste material of infants and small children. One of these is a disposable diaper that is fitted on the baby by the mother or caretaker. Because an adult is doing the fitting, the diaper, in most cases, will be properly fitted on the baby. This is an advantage for the designers of diapers since they can design an absorbent crotch that is relatively wide and flat, in relation to the baby's crotch, to improve containment, and still have the assurance that the adult will properly fit the diaper at the baby's crotch.
In contrast to babies and their diapers, children in the potty training stage and their training pants pose a different scenario. One difference is that these children put on their own training pant, which means that they are the ones responsible for ensuring the pant is properly positioned. As most parents discover, their children are not as careful in or capable of correctly donning the training pant. This results in the training pant sometimes being worn in a twisted or turned condition at the waist and crotch, or not being pulled up to the waist sufficiently to properly fit the absorbent crotch against the wearer. Sometimes the training pant is even put on backwards.
Another problem is that a training pant having a relatively wide and flat absorbent crotch, such as that found in a typical diaper, further exacerbates the problem of an ill-fit. The situation in which a child pulls the pant upwardly in a twisted or turned fashion, or backwards, not only results in improper alignment of the absorbent with the body, but also results in a deformation of the absorbent at the crotch. The deformed absorbent generally will assume the shape of an inverted-U in the crotch. This has an extremely negative impact on the performance of the absorbent. The inverted-U shape tends to cause liquid waste to flow towards either one or both sides of the absorbent, thereby creating pools of waste at the area of least absorbent capacity and highest probability of leaking.
Another difference between the use of a diaper and training pant is that the child wearing a training pant is much more mobile and active than a baby, and this will increase the tendency or chances of a training pant to move out of the correct position.
One attempt to address the above problems was to form the absorbent crotch portion of the training pant more narrow than that of a diaper absorbent crotch portion. This was intended to make the training pant easier to pull up and properly position at the crotch of the wearer. It was also hoped that this would assist or maintain the pant in the proper position during various physical activities of the wearer. However, this attempt was not entirely successful, and posed an additional problem of having a greater tendency of leaking due to the lesser amount of absorbent material in the crotch area, and increasing the possibility of the narrower absorbent crotch portion to be off-center relative to the point of urination.